Gravity uses 3D in a way Anne Billson has never seen before. And unlike
Avatar, Piranha 3D or The Final Destination, it's awe-inspiring

Another 3D film? What a pain. For the first five minutes it’s all squealing and laughter and, Ooh, look! A tree in my face! And eek! Bits of broken glass! Flying straight at me! Followed by an hour and a half of murky-looking action that might as well have been shot through a sock, accompanied by acute discomfort as the ill-fitting 3D spectacles apply deadening pressure to your sinuses.

And heaven help you if the film is Toy Story 3 and makes you cry, in which case the paper tissue you’ve stuffed around the bridge of your nose, to stop the specs digging in, gets sodden and plops into your lap in a porridgey lump.

So the image on the screen in front of you is in 3D? Who cares? Not you, once the novelty of those first few minutes has worn off, and certainly not that portion of the population who can’t see in three dimensions anyway, because they have only one eye, or a strabismus.

Anyway, 2D movies already do a fine job of showing depth of field, and 3D notoriously cuts down the brightness of a film by as much as 88 per cent. So if you’re like me, you opt for the 2D version, every time. 3D? Bof, who needs it?

The 3D process first took off as one of several studio responses to the loss of audiences to television in the early Fifties. Notable 3D films included The Creature from the Black Lagoon, Dial M for Murder and Kiss me Kate. The fad went into decline in the mid-Fifties, but resurfaced sporadically during the next four decades.

The first 3D film I ever saw was in 1975: Andy Warhol’s Flesh for Frankenstein (actually directed by Paul Morrissey) bombarded the audience with dripping entrails, a severed head and a spleen on a stick, albeit blurrily thanks to bungled projection which left everyone with a throbbing headache.

But despite such enticing propositions as Pete Walker’s Seventies-tastic softcore Four Dimensions of Greta, starring Robin Askwith (“A girl in your lap!”), Jaws 3-D (“Reaching new depths of terror”, as the tag line so appositely put it) and a spiffing 3D kung-fu film called Dynasty which kept you ducking with its wacky flying weaponry, 3D remained little more than an occasional gimmick until 2003, when James Cameron released his explore-the-Titanic documentary Ghosts of the Abyss in 3D Imax.

After that, every animated film came with an extra dimension. And when Avatar, Cameron’s 3D sci-fi cowboys and indians in a Roger Dean landscape, broke box-office records, we started getting 3D up the kazoo.

Much of it was not even shot in 3D but converted post-production, in what some of us see as a desperate attempt by studios and cinemas to squeeze even more money out of long-suffering audiences, now obliged to fork out for 3D specs on top of the outrageously overpriced seats and popcorn.

3D can still sometimes be a hoot, in a fairground attraction sort of way, when horror movies such as My Bloody Valentine 3D, The Final Destination, or Piranha 3D shamelessly pelt audiences with body parts, vomit and other tasteless objects. And occasionally you get a director like Sam Raimi, who researched and exploited the process to surprisingly lovely effect for Oz the Great and Powerful.

Other than that, it’s clear most film-makers couldn’t care less, and I can’t think of any other recent examples of 3D film-making that have added anything that would have been missed from the two-dimensional version.

But the studios seem convinced audiences want it, hence the endless humdrum 3D trotted out in cartoons, remakes, superhero sequels, tweeny-bopper musicals and aimed-at-adolescents literary adaptations such as Alice in Wonderland or The Great Gatsby.

But if the story and characters don’t grab us, are we really going to get excited by added bells and whistles? And ye gods, did I really graduate to contact lenses only to find myself wearing spectacles in the cinema all over again? It’s more trouble than it’s worth.

Until now. With Gravity, Alfonso Cuarón has gone and upset my apple cart by using 3D in a way I’ve never seen before. Yes, we get the Ooh, look! Space debris whizzing past my face! effect. But he also harnesses the process to draw the audience directly into the plight of Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, so we experience what they’re experiencing, see what they’re seeing, feel the emptiness and awe-inspiring vastness of space itself – and all of this filmed so seamlessly you catch yourself thinking it must surely have been shot on location.

It’s immersive film-making at its finest, and the nearest we’ll ever get to actually going up there, so take a deep breath (you’ll need the oxygen), choose the biggest screen you can find (Imax if possible) and watch it in 3D. You won’t regret it.